Sonal Mansingh
Time has come for India to heed the warning of our forefathers:
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It is better to perish while doing one’s duty and carrying on responsibility in one’s own environment than to accept alien
values as guiding principles of life.
The discourse today is whether the cultural identity of India is in peril, whether the multi-coloured fabric of Indic traditions is being torn to shreds, whether the core and essence of India’s philosophy and culture are being slowly and deliberately pushed aside.
“Continuity of antiquity” is one of the unique features of Indian culture. Many civilisations of great majesty and riches rose, fell and vanished, leaving behind some artefacts in museums.
Nowhere though a cultural stream manifested itself in a maddening array of richness in diverse fields as in India. From the as-yet-undeciphered script of Mohenjodaro-Harappa with their highly developed town planning skills, seals, pottery, jewellery etc, through the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, epics such as Ramayana and Mahabharata; India’s civilisational route extended in a beautiful arc to South-East Asian countries through maritime trade and to Persia, Rome and beyond through overland trade. Great ideas on philosophy of life accompanied the mundane activity of trading and earning. Real earnings were perhaps the dissemination and
acceptance of Indic beliefs, concepts and cultural traditions, as also in the form of travelogues of monks and scholars travelling to India in search of wisdom and
knowledge. Great deal of authentic information on socio-political, religio-social mores, customs and traditions, rituals and festivals is found in these accounts. It is not easy to imagine the hardships these seekers must have faced. Though most travelled in the North of India, some ventured eastwards too as far as Nalanda in Bihar. Very few ventured further east or southwards. Perhaps therefore, the South with its rich cultural and
philosophical traditions hardly finds mention in any of the famous travelogues and accounts of Fahiyan or Al Beruni and many others. The good news is that therefore culture and traditions in the East and South preserved their values and remained as the bulwark of India’s cultural identity. This was an imposition from Nehruian acceptance of the superiority of so called ‘fashionably liberal’ ideas. Had they been acquainted with the wonderful liberal all-inclusive thoughts contained in the easily readable texts of India, history of India’s tottering education system would have been different. Prime Minister Modi’s slogan “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas” derives from “Sarve bhavantu Sukhino, Sarve Santu Niramaya”. It is a prayer for the good and progress of everyone.
With thousands of forms in performing, visual, plastic arts in every corner of India it was easy task for successive groups of invaders to crush local indigenous arts and impose theirs. From cutting off local environment friendly trees like Deodar in the Himalayan foothills to construct railroads on mainland for war-efforts the British planted Pine trees which degraded the soil.
No bird can build a nest on pine branches because of their harsh thorny serrated leaves. The Swadeshi
indigenous cultural customs to worship plants, trees, roots, flowers, leaves all of which are integrated in religious
rituals, iconography in art forms such as dance, painting, sculpture textiles and jewellery. Rivers and mountains are personified and worshipped. In Rigveda, as in modern-day literature, virtues of Creation, of creative powers of humans are extolled. Our art forms reflect deep mystique and beauty of Creation, of the Cosmic Order and of great philosophy of Shoonya and Poorna. The Void and the Fullness.
Indian mind reached out to such extent where everything in Creation merged to the point where Space and Time began. This Indian mind could see THAT which existed before Creation. That darkness of the unmanifest became Jagannath. The galvanising current of energy took the form of Subhadra whereby the manifest became the white Balabhadra. Our saints were not just dry, parched souls but were full of Rasa and Ananda.
Interestingly India that is Bharatvarsha has always been
visualised as Bharat Mata, the Goddess-like Mother, who protects and nourishes her children. In Sanskrit the word for nation is “Rashtra”. In the 10th Mandala of Rigveda, the lady-Rishi Vach declares herself to be the shining, resplendent soul of this land “???? ????????……..” This is an example worth following. Only if every citizen of India felt worthy of living on this soil by constant striving to fulfill the dreams and aspirations of our forefathers can India again become Bharat. In the current scenario when every good word and idea about India becomes controversial, where words like secularism, liberalism and anti-communalism are bandied around like confetti, where art is confused with conflicting ideas mostly borrowed from here there and everywhere, where culture is termed tolerant or intolerant, where terms like sub-altern and post-truth are applied to every issue, where celebrity stars are born overnight to vanish just as quickly, where speaking Hindi can get you nowhere but English can open every door, when we forget our roots and aspire for the peak, when our children cannot write except on computer, when our rivers once worshipped as Goddesses are polluted and dry up, when forests fall to the greed of the powers that be, when respect and concern for children and elderly have gone with the wind, when every female body is viewed with lustful eyes, the real value of indigenous art and culture can be the only means of repairing the fractured soul of India. In music and dance and poetry lies the solution.
(The writer is a widely acclaimed Bharatiya Classical Dancer)
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